Unfriending: Are People Online Shedding Friends? (Debate)
The New Oxford American Dictionary announced its Word of the Year today and like everyone else, the organization is keeping an eye on the internet. Its selection? unfriend - verb - To remove someone as a 'friend' on a social networking site such as Facebook.
Has Oxford Dictionary made the right selection? ReadWriteWeb's Founder Richard MacManus thinks not. I disagree with him; I think this is a very valid Word of the Year. We make our cases below and invite you to cast your vote in a poll.
Richard MacManus, ReadWriteWeb founder:
"I think that's an odd choice for word of the year, as all the trends indicate there has been more social networking activity this past year - not less, as 'unfriend' implies. Facebook and Twitter have both rocketed in popularity in 2009. I'd suggest that more people have left MySpace and migrated to Facebook, than unfriended people on Facebook.
"I also think that 'unfriend' is an ugly word, so for that reason it shouldn't be Word of the Year. What's more, I don't think my Mum or Dad would be familiar with the term 'unfriend.' Perhaps my father will pop into the comments and tell us for certain. But I look forward to the results of the poll!"
Marshall Kirkpatrick, ReadWriteWeb lead writer:
I think "unfriend" is a very appropriate word for the year as it fits with the way people are becoming more sophisticated in their social networking. People are deciding to do some editing of the friends lists they rushed naively into.
7 out of the top 10 searches performed on the Facebook Help Center page are about getting rid of your own social network profiles or your friends. Admittedly "unfriend" isn't one of those words, but you get the idea.
It's easy in this new web to sign up for things, getting overwhelmed and ignoring streams of information is par for the course. But choosing to cancel receipt of a person's updates? That's a meaningful move.
People fall for those "see who's searching for you" ads on social networks all the time. You'd better believe they appreciate the control that unfriending gives them. I'll bet that just about anyone online, no matter their level of technical knowledge, could tell you these days what it means to "unfriend someone."
What do you think?
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No....online is all about friends. 90% social and 10% research.
I don't know about "word of the year" but I like the word and it's implications. I think it especially applies to Facebook. 300, 700, 1000 friends? Probably not. I just read a comment from a Facebook friend who is about to start purging his Friends list...in other words, unfriending.
I think they were most impressed with the grammatical gymnastics, especially the prefix 'un-' going with a non-adjective. Which is pretty rad. On the social relevancy side, yeah something to do with social networking is definitely relevant as word of 2009, but choosing your word of the year based on a specific platform pretty much ensures you're going to look dumb when that platform is replaced (like if they had chosen 'to myspace' a few years ago).
But in the end, it's all about the preposition.
Facebook yes - I recently unfriended a bunch of people and left myself with people I had a genuine interest in keeping in touch with. It's too easy for "compulsive posters" that you're not overly interested in to dominate your feed - even when you tone down how many messages you want to see from them, they still seem to get through another way :)
Twitter no - I have no real-life friends on Twitter (yet), so if someone is relevant, interesting and not-offensive I leave them there. It's far easier to manage / ignore the data firehose with Twitter.
Disclaimer: I (by design) have
I prefer de-friending. It fits with other removals ie defrock, decamp, decaffeinate.
ahem, to finish:
"Disclaimer: I (by design) have less than 100 friends on each so YMMV"
The term "unfriend" is only relevant to the year because it is used in association with social networking and social sites like Facebook. I do not think it is the best term that The New Oxford American Dictionary could choose for their Word of The Year because that term seems to be almost synonymous with Facebook. You do not "unfriend" Twitter followers, MySpace friends or any other relationship on any other social site (that I am currently aware of/using).
The term of the year should be one that is slightly more universal and relevant than one that specifically relates to one website. I have been a member of Facebook ever since they have allowed me to join (back when it was restricted to specific college email addresses only) and I can not remember the last time (or first) that I "unfriended" someone.
English is a language rich in synonymy—so many words with such a subtle palette to craft a perspective. Adding and borrowing and playing with word-bits (or the morphology of words) is second nature, so I welcome new words and new subtleties to existing words.
However: this "unfriend" word seems like an extremely limited neologism. Instead of adding complexity or subtlety to an existing phrasing, it seems denuded of nuance. It could be so much more descriptive. Think of the context of words like: disassociate, chastise, ostracise, "tick off" or spurn. The semantic richness of such selections practically cries out for more information.
"Zach Beauvais has unfriended you."
Why? for what reason? Has he chosen to disassociate himself from me for some extraneous reason? Has he spurned me out of some passionate hatred? There must be more.
P.S. thanks for opening a Pandora's box of linguistic context for us!
I believe that many other words were more relevant this year, so choosing unfriend as the word of the year was not a good option.
Much more important then the "new terms" following/unfollowing and friending/unfriending were the connections and business done via social networking this year!!
First, choosing the term "unfriend" over "defriend" was unfortunate, because of its lexical proximity to the term "unfriendly" and because it is ugly. Removing a friend connection on a social network has nothing to do with being unfriendly.
Second, I happen to have defriended about forty people on Facebook in the past month. Why? Not because I did not like them, but because there is too much complexity and too much work involved in managing access privileges on Facebook, and I do not want to make it a full time job, thus I pruned my friend network to focus only on these people with whom I feel close enough to share anything that I have to say in my status updates without ever having to think about it. There is much work to be done by Facebook and others to make the whole process clear and seamless.
Third, I believe that the concept (of defriending) deserved to be selected indeed, to highlight this form of backlash against too much social connectivity, following an explosion of that very social connectivity. It is unfortunate since, in an ideal world, everybody should be connected to everybody else, but is that very realistic? Another term could have been selected, but this one is as good as any other.
There should be no dichotomy in online friendship, but rather something like a level of closeness. Facebook should make managing it much easier in the future. In my view, there would be no "Add Friend" button. You would define access/closeness levels, then grant them either through mutual agreement, or partially through automation, for instance by tracking mutual interaction with the other person over time. The concept of friend and fan should be blended into one. Sure, Facebook provides some of these ideas already, but the whole design needs to be revised from the ground up. Bah... just thinking out loud.
Unfriending....well my spell check doesn't like it, and I was always partial to craptacular as the word of the year anyhow.
I would have to say unfriending makes a poor choice for word of the year. Just because people are doing it in massive numbers doesn't mean it's being used in context the same way.
My dad has always said you can pick your friends, but he has never said you can always unfriend the people you dislike or no longer care about.
Unfriend is a pathetic replacement for delete (one of my favorite words) in my book.
I am unfriending as a policy. No companies, no products - I can make those choices outside of Facebook and Twitter
'Unfriend' has gravitated from a noun in my 1993 'Shorter Oxford' to now apparently a verb: negative with paranoid overtones (its tasting notes might muse), yet indeed a word suited for cyberspace. I never encountered 'unfriend' in 40 years of print editing (where's that red pen?). And 'Facebook' to me would be the dust cover: has its meaning also changed?
I do the task - i.e., pare down the list... My name for it is rather less emotive, for me: "unfollowing". (I use it for too-frequent posters, posters who do not respond, and posters of meaningless drivel even if it is not too frequent.)
De-friending would have been my choice and is what I've referred to the act as, when I've had to do it (i.e. remove 'friends' leaving bizarre wall comments and such).
It should be "De-Friend" be even then should not be word of the year.
Unfriend is a SUPER word. It made no sense even just a year ago, and is now part of the larger language palette. I use it almost daily.
And as for the act of unfriending - it's a necessity. Without cultivation, social networks would die a slow, suffocating death in the overgrowth of spammy self-promotion and weedy oversharing.
word of the year should have been......TWEET. thats obvious. everyone is saying it.
Is "google" (as a verb) included in the Oxford American Dictionary?
Nice debate.
In the current social – digital cycle - people still extend the number of people they are in contact with. The average number of friends users have in Facebook is still growing (120 reported March 2009 -
While the tendency to accept friendship is still a social norm in social networks – people became overwhelmed by the number of interactions they are exposed to. This brought to the unfriend behavior.
I believe that as social networks will be more mature – the number of friends will finally stabilize. The stabilization process involves more control and thus much less friendship acceptance to begin with.
I recently did a facebook 'cull' aas I like to call it...getting rid of friends I had accumulated in a moment of social pressure or weakness...some were even people who had approached me in the 'real world' and demanded acceptance on facebook.
Can we have a word for weirding people out by demanding acceptance? It is a serious struggle to decide how to accept and decline!
I don't mind "unfriend" and I for one don't think of it exclusively to facebook. All of the smaller custom social networking websites have the friend lists as well, so "un-friending" is an accross the board thing now.
As far as people demanding acceptance? That is creepy, I guess we could call them "ADD-icts" - ones who have a compulsion to grow friend lists on social networking websites?